International Conference "Aesthetics of Music" 2024

For the second consecutive year, the international conference “Aesthetics of Music” will take place during the Nišville Jazz Festival in Niš, Serbia.

This interdisciplinary event, focusing on music, will bring together scholars and professionals from diverse fields—philosophers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, art theorists, musicians, and festival organizers—from Spain, Poland, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia.

The conference will be held from August 16 to August 18 at the historic Officer’s Club in Niš (Orlovića Pavla 28A, Niš).

This year’s distinguished guests include Nemesio G. C. Puy, a Spanish philosopher specializing in the ontology of music and the current coordinator of the European Network for the Philosophy of Music (ENPM), and Małgorzata Szyszkowska, a Polish aesthetician renowned for her expertise in phenomenological aesthetics and the works of Roman Ingarden.

The conference program is curated by Dušan Milenković, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš and a founding member of the ENPM.

The conference will be conducted in English and will feature four presentations each day, with each presentation lasting 30 minutes followed by a 15-minute discussion period. Please find the complete conference schedule and biographies of all participants below.

Conference program:

16.08. (15:30 – 19:00)

• Jasna Jovićević (Serbia/South Africa) – Readings of Female Identity in Free Jazz: Case Study
• Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska (Poland) – Roman Ingarden’s philosophy of music: imagined communities
• Bojan Blagojević (Serbia) – I’ll be Bach: can musical machines teach us a thing or two about being human
• Jan Hoozee (Belgium) – Ghent Festivities (Ghent, Belgium): city festival with 1.7 million visitors during 10 days – yet for us (Trefpunt) a project of inclusion

17.08. (15:30 – 19:00)

• Ana Hofman (Slovenia) – Musical Amateurism Revisited
• Nemesio G. C. Puy (Spain) – Authenticity in Popular and Classical Music: a Philosophical and Empirical Approach
• Marija Dinov (Serbia) – Performance Practice as a Research Tool in Musicology
• Tin Bačun (Croatia) – Soundscapes of Trance: Music in Hotline Miami

18.08. (15:30 – 19:00)

• Bojana Radovanović (Serbia) – The Aesthetics of Ugliness: Sound and Image of Extreme Metal Music
• Adriana Sabo (Serbia/Slovenia) – Producing the Empowered Balkan Woman in Senidah’s “Dva Prsta”
• Aleksander Brunka (Poland) – Aesthetic problems in the discourse on the auto-tune
• Aleksa Pavlović (Serbia) – The Concept of Persona: Reflections on the Importance of Context in Evaluating Performances

The participants:

Jasna Jovićević, Ph.D. (Serbia/South Africa) is a distinguished musician, composer, and researcher who has performed at major festivals across Europe, the USA, and Canada. Jasna earned her degree in Jazz Saxophone Performance and Teaching from the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, followed by an MA in Music Composition from York University in Toronto, and a PhD in Arts and Media from Singidunum University in Belgrade. She has garnered international recognition through her participation in prestigious Arts & Science projects like Ars Electronica, Artist-in-Residences in New York and San Francisco, and various music competitions. In 2023, she published the acclaimed and award-winning monograph “Good Morning Jazzwomen” (Orion Art Books). Starting in 2024, she serves as an Adjunct Research Associate at Tshwane University of Technology Arts Campus in Pretoria, South Africa. Her discography includes seven solo albums and numerous collaborations.

Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska (Poland) graduated from the Ph.D. program in philosophy in 2000 and in 2018 received a habilitation in Human Sciences. After working as a research fellow at the Music Department of Cardiff University in the UK (2001-2003) she has worked as an academic lecturer at the University of Warsaw (2004-2019) and then at the Chopin University of Music (2019-2022). In 2023 she has been a project coordinator for the Welcome Centre and a specialist for the international exchange of students and staff in a hybrid environment at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN. She is currently an expert for graduate exams at the Chopin University of Music and teaches aesthetics at the Academy of Economic and Human Sciences (2023-2024). Her interests span across everyday aesthetics, the aesthetic experience, philosophical writings of Roman Ingarden, Theodor W. Adorno, Edmund Gurney, and John Dewey, phenomenology of listening, cultural axiology, and the philosophy of music. She has recently concluded a project on music no 2016/23/B/HS1/02325 financed by the National Center of Science and works on EU special project Communities and Artistic Participation in Hybrid Environment CAPHE. She is an author of “Wsłuchując się w muzykę. Studia z fenomenologii słuchania” (2017) and many other articles and book chapters.

Bojan Blagojević (Serbia) (1980), assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia. His fields of interest include existential philosophy, history of ethics, and metaphilosophy. He is the author of the book “Kierkegaard on the Individual and Community” (“Kjerkegor o pojedincu i zajednici”). Blagojević has published numerous scientific articles in the field of ethics, aesthetics, and contemporary philosophy, including “Marx on the Need for Art: Art between Political Economy and Self-Determination”, “Aestheticism and Decontextualization”, and “Indirect Communication as a Language-Game: Kierkegaard Through a Late-Wittgensteinian Lens”.

Jan Hoozee (Belgium) is the artistic coordinator of the core organizer of the Ghent Festivities. Trefpunt is an organization created in 1962 by folk singer/sculptor Walter De Buck as a gallery and macrobiotic restaurant. In 1970 he re-invented the dying Ghent Festivities in front of his venue, as a hippie, left-wing, and rebellious 10-day festival, one of the first of its kind in Belgium. It comprised rock, jazz, folk, and world music from the start, connecting with growing minorities in the city. More than 50 years later Trefpunt is still the defender of a diverse programmation in one of the biggest city festivals of Europe, that has become more and more commercial and pure entertainment. On 6 stages Trefpunt programs world music, folk, jazz, rock, pop, urban, circus, street theatre, dance, workshops, debates, literature, and much more … Jan Hoozee studied cultural anthropology and management. He has been an amateur musician and a DJ and radio producer for decades. He coordinated Zephyrus Records for 10 years before continuing his approach towards culture and society under the wings of Trefpunt. His dada? Connection people through music and culture. Trefpunt is also the coordinator of the Sounds Of Europe, a network of 13 festivals in Europe, exchanging artists thanks to support from Creative Europe.

Ana Hofman (Slovenia) is an ethnomusicologist and anthropologist. She is interested in music, sound and politics in socialist and post-socialist societies, with an emphasis on memory, affect and activism. In her current project focused on post-Yugoslav activist choirs, she uses both archival and ethnographic methods to examine the politics of memorializations of socialism after Yugoslavia. She has published two monographs: Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performances in Serbia (Brill, 2011) and Music, Affect, Politics: New Lives of Partisan Songs in Slovenia (ZRC 2015), translated into Serbian as New Lives of Partisan Songs (Biblioteka XX vek, 2016). She is a lecturer at ZRC SAZU Postgraduate School, Ljubljana. In Winter semester 2017 she was a visiting lecturer at the University of Performing Arts, Graz, Austria while in Summer semester 2018 she was a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the Graduate School of City University of New York. She was a visiting fellow at the School of Music, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Southeastern European Studies, University of Graz, Austria; Visiting researcher at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center for Balkan studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Visiting Research Fellow at New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania,  Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany and the Department of Music, University of Chicago. She has received the Danubius Mid-Career Award  by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the Institute for Central Europe and Danube Region in 2018.

Nemesio G. C. Puy (Spain) (born in Lisbon, 1987) is a Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Complutense University of Madrid, the main coordinator of the European Network for the Philosophy of Music and a member of the Complutense Institute for Musical Sciences. His main interests are in the philosophy of music, aesthetics, ontology and metaontology, specially focusing on the phenomenon of musical versions, authenticity, creativity and interpretation. His outputs have been published in top academic journals like the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Synthese, or Philosophical Psychology, and awarded with the John Fisher Prize by the American Society for Aesthetics (2019) and with the Fabian Dorsch Prize by the European Society for Aesthetics (2021). His also a co-principal investigator, along with Paloma Atencia Linares, of the project ‘The grounds of artistic rights and the limits of appropriation’. Nemesio has also developed a parallel career as a French horn player, having recorded 6 albums of classical and popular music, and has performed with several orchestras, like the Malaga Symphony Orchestra, Granada City Orchestra, BTT Badenwailer and Cambridge University Symphony Orchestra. With the Proemium Metals Brass Quintet he has been awarded with Second Prize of the Burke & Bagley Competition (USA 2017), the first prize of the Mediterranean Brass Music Festival Competition (Spain 2013), and has been finalist of the Jan Koetsier Competition (Music Conservatory of Munich and Bavarian Radio Orchestra) in 2014 and 2016, respectively.

Marija Dinov (Serbia) (1980) is a pianist with a specific and refined artistic sensibility. She completed her piano studies at the Faculty of Arts in Niš (2003). During her studies, she was one of the best students at the University of Niš, which was recognized by the scholarship from the Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway, and especially by the University Charter awarded to her as the best student of the Faculty of Arts in her generation. After graduation, she attended postgraduate piano studies at the National Music Academy in Sofia, as a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Bulgaria. There she received her Master’s degree (2006), having defended her MA thesis entitled “Peculiarities of musical language in the piano works of Claude Debussy”. During her postgraduate studies, she was a scholarship holder of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Bulgaria. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “Studies of Performing Arts: Performativity and the Function of Body Gesture in Pianism”, was defended in 2019 at the University of Arts in Belgrade, in the interdisciplinary studies of art theory and media. For fifteen years (2005-2019) Marija Dinov worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of Piano of the Faculty of Arts in Niš, and from July 2024, she is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts.

Tin Bačun (Croatia) (univ. mag. litt. comp.) was born on December 30, 1994, in Zagreb, where he graduated in Comparative Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the president of the NGO “Knowledge Warehouse,” and has several years of experience as a radio announcer and film worker. With the film “Clerical Error,” he participated in the 12th ZagrebDOX. Since 2018, he has been an external associate for the Croatian Film Chronicle, and he is currently working as the chief editor of a monograph on Lukas Nola.

Bojana Radovanović (Serbia), musicologist and art theorist, is a research associate at the Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, studying the relations of voice to vocal technique and new technologies in contemporary art and popular music. Her research interests include contemporary music and art, voice, metal music, art and media, and transdisciplinary research. She has published three books, and co-edited one collective monograph and a posthumous collection of papers by esteemed Prof. Vesna Mikić. She is a co-founder of the Association for Preservation, Research and Promotion of Music ‘Serbian Composers’, Association for the Study of Popular Music from Belgrade, and a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the scientific journal INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology published in Sarajevo.

Adriana Sabo (Serbia/Slovenia) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2552-1457) is a PhD candidate at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She was a PhD candidate at the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music in Belgrade (2014 – 2020), and was employed as a Junior Researcher and a Research Associate at the same institution. She holds master’s degrees in musicology (2012) and gender studies (2015). She is a member of the Serbian Musicological Society, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and a former contributor to the Center for Popular Music Research (Belgrade). She is one of the founders of the Association for the Study of Popular Music based in Belgrade.

Aleksander Brunka (Poland) is a second-degree student in the Institute of Musicology in the University of Warsaw. In 2023 he defended his bachelor degree thesis, called Deathcore as a genre and style between 2003 and 2007. He has participated in numerous conferences in Poland and abroad. He co-organized an international conference Music on the periphery of aesthetics, held in June 2024 at the University of Warsaw. His first publications: Can Black Metal Be Pink? Discussion of inappropriateness of the album Sunbather by Deafheaven in selected reviews and Characteristics of deathcore as a genre in the early stages of the phenomenon (until 2007) will be published in 2024. His master degree thesis will be focusing on the reception of the auto-tune. His main scientific interests are the social contexts of popular music. 

Aleksa Pavlović (Serbia) is an undergraduate student of Philosophy in Niš (Serbia), and also International Politics in Milan (Italy). Aesthetics is one of his primary interests, with an emphasis on music. Aleksa speaks five languages and has worked and lived in Toronto, Milan, and Barcelona. In addition to philosophy, he is also an avid athlete – he has recently run the Belgrade Marathon, has a UEFA C coaching license, and has worked as a tutor, football referee, and coach.

The organizer:

Dusan Milenkovic (1991) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1860-5502 is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš (Serbia). He defended his Ph.D. “The Role of Form in Aesthetics of Popular Music” at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad (Serbia) in 2023. Milenkovic is one of the founding members and a member of the Steering Committee of the European Network for the Philosophy of Music, as well as a member of the Steering Committee of the Serbian Association for Aesthetics. He is a member of the International Advisory Board for the Finnish international journal Popular Inquiry, a member of the Editorial Board of Serbian Sociological Annual Journal, and a team member of the Nisville Jazz Festival organization. Milenković is the author of more than 20 scientific articles. At the University of Niš, he conducts courses on aesthetics, history of aesthetics, aesthetics and popular art, aesthetics of music, and pragmatist philosophy. He is one of the founders of the Cultural Club “Prejaka reč”, the organizer of the conference “Aesthetics of Music”.

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The 2023 conference gallery:

The program of the 2023 conference:

10.08. (PROGRAM IN ENGLISH)

15:20-15:30 Opening words – the director of the festival Ivan Blagojević and the conference organizer Dušan Milenković

15:30-16:00 Krzysztof Guczalski (Krakow, Poland) – “On two paradigms of emotion in music”
Discussion (10 minutes)
16:10-16:40 Mihailo Antović (Niš, Serbia) – “From Beethoven to Keith Jarrett: Multilevel Grounding of Musical Meaning”
Discussion (10 minutes)

Coffee break (15 minutes)

17:05-17:35 Ana Hofman (Ljubljana, Slovenia) – “Music and Activism:The Post-Yugoslav reflections”
Discussion (10 minutes)
17:45-18:15 Rastislav Dinić (Niš, Serbia) – “Metallica’s “One”: Heavy Metal as Philosophy”
Discussion (10 minutes)
18:25-18:55 Dušan Milenković (Niš, Serbia) – “Should there be an aesthetics of world music?”
Discussion (10 minutes)

General discussion (15 minutes)

11.08. (PROGRAM IN ENGLISH)

16:00-16:30 Ivar Roban Križić (Vienna, Austria) – “Performative Probing: Reflections on Improvisation, Theory, and Artistic Research”
Discussion (10 minutes)
16:40-17:10 Matija Vigato (Zagreb, Croatia) – “Inner Music as a Metaphysical Problem”
Discussion (10 minutes)

Coffee break (15 minutes)

17:35-18:05 Jan Defrančeski (Zagreb, Croatia) – “On the Musical Structure of Nature: From Aesthetic Experience to Environmental Ethics”
Discussion (10 minutes)
18:15-18:45 Bojan Blagojević (Niš, Serbia) – “What is it like to be Music?”
Discussion (10 minutes)

General discussion (15 minutes)

12.08. (PROGRAM IN SERBIAN)

16:00-16:30 Dragan Žunić (Niš, Srbija) – “Estetsko nagoveštavanje smisla u muzici”
Discussion (10 minutes)
16:40-17:10 Đurica Stojanović (Niš, Srbija) – “Muzika i građanska neposlušnost”
Discussion (10 minutes)
17:20-17:50 Miloš Jovanović (Niš, Srbija) – “Popularno pravoslavlje: muzika i kulturna hegemonija u Srbiji”
Discussion (10 minutes)

General discussion (15 minutes)

Coffee break (15 minutes)

18:30 – 19:00 Melanija Pović Jagarinec (Zagreb, Hrvatska) – Promocija emisije “Svijet jazza” na Hrvatskoj radio-televiziji (HRT)